Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

There is a mode of reasoning about Jesus and other religious matters that is a seductive mistake. Our inquiries into some matter can be oriented towards defending a belief, or they can be evidence driven by and receptive to whatever conclusion is best justified. The difference is that we often approach the world with pre-formed conclusion or preference already in mind and that guides our investigation. Then as we consider new information that is relevant to that cherished doctrine, we are receptive to the arguments, evidence, and reasoning that corroborate it and we are hostile to arguments that run counter to it. The exercise of our reason is separated from truth as the goal, and it is co-opted in the service of some particular belief that might be deeply mistaken. Consider a lawyer with great rhetorical and analytical skill whose sole purpose is to defend a mob client, without any real concern for truth or justice. The lawyer’s intellectual powers for reasoning, constructing arguments, and answering objections have been detached from the goal of drawing the correct or true conclusion. But the defense of the client, or the skeptical analysis of the evidence against the client, can be complex, carefully reasoned, penetrating, and seductive. Here the conclusion or goal-- get the client off—constrains the reasoning. Reasoning is subjugated to a particular end result. Its critical function is confined to constructing rationales for rejecting any considerations that might show the defendant’s guilt.

By contrast, we can attempt to make an objective, balanced, and non-prejudicial approach to the relevant body of information, keeping the truth as our goal. Ideally, we do not let our preference for one outcome or some priori prejudice skew our gathering and evaluation of the evidence. And we are resolved to accept whatever outcome that evaluation supports. The conclusion is open during the search and evaluation phase. And the investigation determines the conclusion at the end instead of the prior belief constructing the investigation from the start. Here it is the evidence that directs us to the resulting conclusion and we are prepared and committed to accepting whatever result that is. The inquiry determines the belief, not the other way around.

We are all guilty of lapsing into rationalizing some preferred conclusion instead of pursuing the second model. With God beliefs, the problem is much more pronounced. People often acquire their religious beliefs when they are young and receptive to supernatural thinking. Some people are among the part of the population with strong or hyper-religious tendencies. The beliefs hold deep emotional, social, and psychological appeal. For many people, the promise of eternal life hangs in the balance. To make matters more difficult, there is a growing scientific consensus that evolution has wired us to be religious. Religious beliefs are at the center of a perfect storm of neurobiological, evolutionary, emotional, social, and psychological forces that make them some of the hardest matters in our lives for us to reason clearly about.

Some believers dedicate themselves to constructing rationalistic defenses of their doctrine. The doctrine itself is the unquestionable starting point, or the presupposition. The purpose of the apologetic or polemic exercise is to then expose flaws, or generate objections to any world view that differs from that doctrine. Reasoning has been subordinated to religious belief; its use is confined to constructing defenses and corroborations of the belief. But the acceptability of the belief itself is not responsive to reasoning. No reasoning is permitted to raise legitimate doubts about its fundamental legitimacy. The domain of reasoning is restricted just as the lawyer’s application of her rhetorical and argumentative skills have been wholly subordinated to getting her client off the hook. The question of guilt is left aside. Nicholas Wolterstorff says,

The religious beliefs of the Christian scholar ought to function as control beliefs within his devising and weighing of theories. . . Since his fundamental commitment to following Christ ought to be decisively ultimate in his life, the rest of his life ought to be brought into harmony with it. As control, the belief-content of his authentic commitment ought to function both negatively and positively. Negatively, the Christian scholar ought to reject certain theories on the ground that they conflict or do not comport well with the belief content of his authentic commitment. (Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 72)

In this light, Wolterstorff and William Lane Craig are defense attorneys for Jesus. Their explicit goal is to evaluate everything with regard to whether it supports their beliefs about Jesus. Reason must be subordinated to faith. Here is Craig in making some candid remarks about his focused pursuit of belief in Jesus at all costs.

He has a “self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit” in his heart in which he knows that “Christianity is true “wholly apart from the evidence.” With enough diligence and time, any new information can be made to conform to that which cannot and should not be doubted.

What’s particularly chilling and frustrating about Craig here is the tight, and inpenetrable circle that he has constructed. First, reason must be subordinated to faith. Nothing can be allowed to controvert Jesus. Suspend all questions and doubts, no matter how legitimate, until you can devise a way to engineer or rationalize them into conformity with the prior belief. The “right” picture of the evidence is defined as the one that conforms with Christianity. No other outcome is permitted. If you have doubts, “cultivate your spiritual life, engaging in spiritual disciplines, like prayer, meaningful worship, Christian music, sharing your faith with other people, being involved in Christian service, so that you will foster the witness of the Holy Spirit in your life so that you will be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Doubting is an enemy to be denied, rejected, or coerced into conformity with the “incontrovertible” belief. Doubting is the evil work of Satan. (Note that in a genuine intellectual investigation with truth as its goal, doubt is best and only tool we have. Doubt is the welcome antidote.) And finally, when you find a way to engineer an analysis of a doubt that can bring it into conformity with the Jesus belief, it “leaves you with the conviction that Christianity does indeed stand intellectually head and shoulders above every “ism” or philosophy that it might compete with.”

See the circle? Put Christianity first and make all of your reasoning support it. Suspend all doubts, and then employ your reasoning where you can, only to corroborate Christianity. Then you will find that Christianity is superior to any other “ism,” or position. Christianity is right. Suspend any doubts that might lead you to think that Christianity is not right. Then only use your reasoning to defend Christianity, and then you will be satisfied that Christianity is right.

What’s disturbing about the strategy that Craig has constructed to insure that Christian belief is always vindicated is that it can be used to defend any view. Here’s some verbatim quotes from Craig, with only a few key terms changed:

Question: Some of us who wish to subscribe to a belief in unicorns have our doubts. When we go to college, they raise issues that seem to undermine the belief that unicorns are real, magical creatures who give us delight. What is your advice?

Answer: First, they need to understand the proper relationship between faith in unicorns and reason. The way in which I know that unicorns are real is on the basis of the witness of the magical Unicorn spirit in my heart. And this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that unicorns are real wholly apart from the evidence. . . If I were to pursue this with due diligence and time, I would discover that the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the magical Unicorn tells me. It’s very important to get the relationship of faith in the magical unicorn and reason right, otherwise, what that means is that our faith in the magical unicorn is dependent upon the shifting sands of evidence and argument which change from person to person,. . . whereas the magical Unicorn and his testimony gives every generation and every person immediate access to a knowledge of him that is independent of the shifting sands of time and place and person and historical contingency. . . and finally, the secret will be to cultivate your magical unicorn spiritualism, engaging in spiritual unicorn disciplines, like praying to the magical unicorn, meaningful worship of the unicorn, magical unicorn music, sharing your faith with other unicornists, being involved in Unicornist service, so that you will foster the witness of the magical Unicorn in your life so that you will be filled with it. . . then it will leave you with the conviction that Unicornism does indeed stand head and shoulders above every “ism” or a-Unicornist philosophy.

It is possible to implant, sustain, and foster a belief in anything with this strategy. And since the only permitted employments of reasoning are those that support the belief, it cannot be reasoning that originally justifies the conclusion. The strategy for deealing with doubts insures that the dogma is conserved, immune to any considerations that might lead to its reasonable rejection. Unicorns are silly and somewhat harmless, but the framework for building a mind-consuming cult that Craig has outlined here works for UFO suicide cults, the Branch Davidian, the Jonestown suicide cult, Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo group, the Raelian UFO church, Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Falun Gong, the Church of Bible Understanding, and thousands of others.

Here’s a kind of enslavement far more dangerous than any physical chains. Get some young people interested in your movement. Teach them that your central dogma must be first and central in their lives. Tell them to suspend all of their doubts unless they can construct a rationalization that refutes the doubt and confirms the central dogma. Urge them to surround themselves with other believers and exploit any means possible to foster positive and poignant feelings about the central dogma. Encourage them to feel vindicated that their cult is superior in every way to all other worldviews.

In a healthy arrangement, one’s faculties of reasoning would be engaging in evaluating competing hypotheses by their respective conformity to a broad, objective body of evidence. That is, the vital role of reasoning is to raises doubts that undermine some conclusions, leaving those that fit the best. But doubts that cannot be subjugated to Christianity have been excluded from play for Craig, and reasoning can only be employed with the explicit purpose of corroborating a particular, prejudicial conclusion. Our general predicament is that with enough ingenuity, cleverness, and time, people can construct rationalizations for anything, and then raise doubts and figure out objections to any contrary view. So when you’re deep in it with Craig, it can really feel like you’re reasoning carefully and critically from premises to conclusions. But 9-11 conspiracy theories, global warming deniers, Holocaust deniers, Birthers about President Obama’s citizenship, Illuminati theorists, and countless other examples show how far ill-founded rationalizing can take people from the truth.

Craig’s and Wolterstorff’s revelations here put their arguments for God in a new light. When Craig presses the Kalam argument, or any other argument for a religious conclusion, what we see now is that he doesn’t really mean it. He has openly resolved to reject any other argument no matter what its merits if it doesn’t have the right conclusion. The acceptability of any argument is determined solely by whether it gives him the conclusion he already favors. Trying to argue him out of that conclusion is doomed to fail because the only legitimate function that reasoning can be put to, as he sees it, is in support of Jesus. There are no considerations, reasons, pieces of evidence, or arguments, even in principle that could possibly dissuade him. That would presume that his conclusions about Jesus were arrived at on the basis of reasoning, and not the other way around.

That means that we must attach an asterisk is any pseudo-reasoning or faux-arguments that they present for their conclusions. Without knowing how Craig’s meta-rational convictions actually undermine any rational discourse, you might be fooled into thinking he’s engaged in authentic reasoning and evidence analysis. We should be careful to not confuse a sophisticated rhetoric in the service of a predetermined conclusion for real critical analysis or a genuine appeal to reason to justify a claim.

Ultimately, I think we must treat this sort of choice to enslave oneself to religious belief as arbitrary, groundless, and without principle. If all reasoning is subordinated to the goal of defending the doctrine, then it cannot really be that sound reasoning supports and justifies the doctrine. The defender has constructed a polemical castle in the sky that has no foundation. Ultimately there can be no reasoned preference for the belief that justifies adopting some other ideology that happened to co-opt one’s thinking. If he was motivated, a clever apologist could construct a comparable framework of justifications and rebuttals with a belief in The Great Pumpkin or fairies at the center that is just as impressive. And when it’s UFO suicide cults, or Jim Jones, the results are disastrous. Despite the fact that they seem to employ sophisticated and careful reasoning to defend their beliefs, we have to conclude that they have left the playing field of rationality. If you’ve been seduced by one of these rationalizations, or by something like Christian apologetics, you’ve been sold a bill of goods.

31 comments:

Amen. When Craig presents mathematical or scientific arguments in his defense of the Kalam cosmological argument, it may appear sophisticated to those without the specialized knowledge to evaluate his presentation. But to those with a thorough familiarity with the relevant subject matter, it is clear that Craig and his ilk present a very selective, distorted view in order to make their case.

For example, if one had a knowledge of current cosmology that was both broad and deep, one might notice the shortcomings in the presentations of Craig et al which are pointed out in this video: Against the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Likewise, if one has a thorough knowledge of mathematics, Craig's pronouncements on infinities and probabilities will be seen not to make the grade.

I think you would have made your case much more effectively by simply letting Craig's confession of lack of objectivity speak for itself. I mean, he freely admits that he's not objective.

By tacking on your unrelated pastiche of tired and cliched arguments for atheism, you sort of distract from the main point of the post (Craig's lack of objectivity), and come across as an eager prosecution lawyer who is not "evidence driven by and receptive to whatever conclusion is best justified".

Thanks for the comment and the link JS. There's no argument for atheism here. I think you're missing the point of my comments. There is a deep internal problem to adopting a circular and self-sustaining position of this sort, that's all. Atheists can be just as guilty of the inversion as anyone else. But few people are as candid about it as Craig or Wolterstorff.

OK, I might have misunderstood you. I was reacting largely to this part:

"With God beliefs, the problem is much more pronounced. People often acquire their religious beliefs when they are young and receptive to supernatural thinking. Some people are among the part of the population with strong or hyper-religious tendencies. The beliefs hold deep emotional, social, and psychological appeal. For many people, the promise of eternal life hangs in the balance. To make matters more difficult, there is a growing scientific consensus that evolution has wired us to be religious. Religious beliefs are at the center of a perfect storm of neurobiological, evolutionary, emotional, social, and psychological forces that make them some of the hardest matters in our lives for us to reason clearly about."

If you're saying that all of these things cut both ways, that they muddy the waters for people on both sides of the issue, then I apologize. It sure sounded to me like you were saying, "Theists are especially susceptible to bias because of all of these factors".

All 5 or 6 of the things you listed are pet peeves of mine, because both sides throw them out as proof, but neither side seems interested in actually doing the hard work of collecting empirical evidence.

For example, when faced with empirical evidence of an innate propensity to believe, Plantinga immediately concludes "sensus divinitatus!", while others claim that it's proof that theism is a cognitive defect. Seriously? Why don't people just calm down and do some actual research, run some models, and get a clearer picture of how these things work?

Or take belief in the afterlife. The idea that there is a heaven will provide deep emotional appeal for accepting Christianity, but convincing oneself that there is no hell will provide deep emotional appeal for rejecting Christianity. Both sides claim that the other side is allowing desire to trump reason. Again, it's a tragedy, because it would be easy enough to fill in the holes in our empirical knowledge. Why is nobody filling in the empirical holes? Maybe it's because both sides have already made up their minds and don't care whether the data support their conclusions.

Or how about upbringing? The empirical data about upbringing's effect on belief would be easy to collect, but I don't think I've ever seen a dispassionate analysis from the fanboys on either side of the issue. The studies I've seen seem to indicate that culture and genetics are more important than parental upbringing (and the idea that the imprint of belief or skepticism is due to youthful "gullibility" is highly suspect). But they barely scratch the surface. Let's compare people raised in an official atheist culture like Russia or China with people raised in a strong culture of belief like Saudi Arabia.

As far as I'm concerned, these are all wide open questions that aren't even close to being compelling for either side. And there is no need for speculation -- we could easily be augmenting our empirical knowledge if we wanted to.

Hey JS, I have a question about two of the issues you brought up. I certainly agree that polarization is rampant and it often stifles progress, but I'm also curious as to how one would go about furthering empirical research in these regards.

For example, when faced with empirical evidence of an innate propensity to believe, Plantinga immediately concludes "sensus divinitatus!", while others claim that it's proof that theism is a cognitive defect. Seriously? Why don't people just calm down and do some actual research, run some models, and get a clearer picture of how these things work?

Even if we had a perfect picture of how religious belief has evolved in the brain, what would that mean for either side? I would imagine Platinga would still offer up the fact that God engineered us for belief, while others like Dennett would still paint it as a hallucinatory side effect of human evolution. I'm skeptical that a complete picture would move the issue in any direction.

Or take belief in the afterlife. The idea that there is a heaven will provide deep emotional appeal for accepting Christianity, but convincing oneself that there is no hell will provide deep emotional appeal for rejecting Christianity. Both sides claim that the other side is allowing desire to trump reason. Again, it's a tragedy, because it would be easy enough to fill in the holes in our empirical knowledge. Why is nobody filling in the empirical holes? Maybe it's because both sides have already made up their minds and don't care whether the data support their conclusions.

I'm unsure as to what type of data Christians could use to support the existence of Heaven, or if there would be any data that would definitively disprove the Heaven thesis. If it is a physical place, we certainly have not found it, and especially have seen no evidence for people leaving Earth to Heaven. If it's spiritual, I don't think that science will offer anything in the way of tangible evidence for a spiritual residence.

That's a much more thoughtful and constructive arg, JS. And much of it I can get behind. Despite their slogans and mantras, I don't see that atheists as a whole are more typically objective and thoughtful about the God question. When I speak to those groups I end up explaining the fallacies in atheist args and presenting more charitable theistic args than they have considered.

One difference for the theist is that evolution does not appear to have built us to disbelieve. So the believer has his more of his neurobiology to worry about. Our brains work against our objectivity.

Can you honestly say that you are truly open to the possibility that God exists? Do you have any presuppositional beliefs, such as naturalistic materialism, that makes the possibility of God’s existence untenable? Do you think that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are truly open to the possibility that God exists? When you are “Proving the Negative” aren’t you essentially just doing what William Lane Craig does, but in the negative form? Just as there are some theists that want God to exist, aren’t there some atheists, such as Thomas Nagel, who do not want God to exist? Is it even possible to be truly free from emotions and presupositional beliefs when it comes to evaluating God’s existence?

I think you are making a straw man out of what Craig said. Craig believes that the various arguments for God’s existence, taken together, show that God’s existence is probable. He knows that an absolute proof of God’s existence is not possible, given our current background knowledge, but he believes that there are arguments that can persuade some rational people to believe that God’s existence is likely. However, he believes the Holy Spirit testifies to believers that God’s existence is true. This is more of a sense that God exists. This sense that God exists and is interacting with believers is taken on faith.

This is more of a side issue, but your example of equating the defense of the existence of unicorns with the defense of the existence of God is a false analogy because we can use the Santa Principle to determine that unicorns don’t exist on the earth. The second is that unicorns are not necessary beings while God is.The Santa Principle says that a person is justified in believing that X does not exist if all of these conditions are met:

1. the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined, and2. all of the available evidence that X exists is inadequate, and3. X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then it would show.

So, using premises one and two we can say that unicorns don’t exist on earth because we have never seen any evidence of them. Since unicorns are said to be physical beings we should have found some evidence of them by now. Even if you assume that they are hiding in some very remote region then we should have at least found a unicorn skull that verify their existence. However, we haven’t found any evidence of them so we can say with near certainty that unicorns do not exist on earth. Notice, however, that the Santa Principle says that the, “Area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined,” so we can’t say that we have searched the entire universe for unicorns. It could be possible that a planet 1,000 light years away has unicorns running around on it. Now, when we turn to using the principle to test whether God exists there are problems. God is said to be an immaterial being who does not reside on the earth. Since we currently do not have the ability to perceive immaterial beings we can’t say that the area where God exists has been comprehensively examined. God could very well exist in heaven, but we simply do not have the capacity to see him.

The second difference between unicorns and God is that the existence of unicorns is not necessary while the existence of everything is dependent on God. Unicorns, if they exist, would just be like lions, bears or humans in that nothing is dependent on their existence, so unicorns could conceivably exist or not exist. If unicorns didn’t exist then the universe and the earth would still exist. However, God is said to be an immaterial, eternal omnipotent being who must exist if the universe and everything in it is to exist. God is the uncaused cause that formed the universe and sustains it. Without God noting would exist. If unicorns were to exist then they would be dependent on God too. They would need to live in a universe on a planet, things that would not exist if God did not create and sustain them. As a material, biological beings unicorns would also be ultimately be dependent on God. Unicorns would be dependent on organs to survive and those organs would be dependent on cells and those cells would be dependent on elements and those elements which would be dependent atoms and so on, but we would get to point where subatomic particles would need to be dependent on something to exist. If there is something in the chain of being that is dependent on something that doesn’t exist then that thing couldn’t exist and then that means that everything in the chain of being that depends on that thing wouldn’t exist either. This means that all material and beings are dependent on God who is the uncaused cause--an agent of pure act.

"Even if we had a perfect picture of how religious belief has evolved in the brain, what would that mean for either side? I would imagine Platinga would still offer up the fact that God engineered us for belief, while others like Dennett would still paint it as a hallucinatory side effect of human evolution."

At a minimum, I think it would force a major change in how Christians defend belief. It would shift the argument to a more fruitful place, IMO. For example, the explanatory role of "revelation" would be very different if we could point to certain belief features as being inevitable results of an evolutionary process.

I compare it to the way that we had a lot of open questions about evolutionary biology and altruism. And then when started using computational tools to model things, informed by game theory, it changed the whole conversation.

Some interesting questions off the top of my head:

1) We're the only species we know who have religion. How might religion vary across species (and how might it stay the same)? If we kill off all of the other animals, we'll be the only species with legs, too. But that doesn't mean that legs are the only or best form of locomotion, or that our form of religion is the only one that might arise through an evolutionary process. Knowing which parts of the human experience of religion are essential cross-species and which are arbitrary (maybe all of it?) would change the conversation.

2) Religion seems to sit on top of intentionality. We can't explain intentionality evolutionarily, except by pointing out that it's a useful "stance" (Dennett's view). If we had a really strong story from natural selection to intentionality to religion, it could make a case for science being the ultimate religion. If, instead, we have to look at religion as just a stance on top of a stance, then we have to evaluate it separately.

"I'm unsure as to what type of data Christians could use to support the existence of Heaven"

By empirical evidence, I mean evidence to support the claim that Christians or atheists are simply believing what they want to believe. It wouldn't be difficult to test these claims and form a much more nuanced picture. Lots of people reject Christianity because Christian beliefs are unappealing. And lots of people adopt atheism even though they find Christian beliefs more appealing. Everyone (atheist and Christian alike) brags about how they were compelled by the truth to believe even though it was contrary to their nature. I don't believe any of them, and I want hard empirical evidence.

There is also the fascinating question of what people actually believe versus what they profess to believe. It's trickier, but not impossible, to measure this empirically. Until we have solid empirical evidence, both sides just claim the high ground.

Thanks Keith. You realize that I wrote up and explained the version of the Santa principle that you are lecturing me with, right? And you realize that you're missing the point about Craig and Wolterstorff completely, right?

"One difference for the theist is that evolution does not appear to have built us to disbelieve. So the believer has his more of his neurobiology to worry about. Our brains work against our objectivity."

I think that's too broad a claim. Evolution has wired our brains to be objective and disbelieve a great many things (otherwise, we'd be wiped out), but credulous about other things. Both atheism and theism embrace certain innate human predispositions, while suppressing others in the name of "higher truth". And a great many propositions of modern theism work strongly against what people are predisposed to believe. It's easy to see how a "hyperactive agency detection" module could lead to the totemistic religions and belief in witches and ghosts -- but human DNA hasn't really evolved since then, and modern theism explicitly rejects these things. If anything, modern monotheism looks like something created by a priest with Aspergers who is trying to rid his race of innate superstition. It doesn't really look like something that would spontaneously emerge from our evolved nature.

Anyway, if we're trying to make a case that atheists are uniquely overcoming human predispositions "in the service of truth", the strongest case would be in overcoming teleological thinking. Teleological thinking is a deep-seated human impulse that is often wrong, and is often very difficult to overcome. Beyond that (which, admittedly, is pretty huge), it's not as clear to me who has the upper hand in overcoming self-delusion. BTW, I think it's completely possible to systematically analyze the question and come to conclusions based on hard data; it just doesn't seem like people care.

This is more of a side issue, but your example of equating the defense of the existence of unicorns with the defense of the existence of God is a false analogy because we can use the Santa Principle to determine that unicorns don’t exist on the earth. The second is that unicorns are not necessary beings while God is.

I'm not sure you've heard all the best arguments for Santa and unicorns. What is your disproof of Santa, that you've searched the entire surface of the Earth and he can't be found? OK then, he lives under the ocean at the North Pole. Visiting all the chimneys in the world would require him to move too fast? Well then, he uses a wormhole so he actually doesn't have to travel far at all. Imagine that for every argument you made against Santa, I was willing to come up with a counter, no matter how preposterous. I could point out one argument which has actually been put forward by a Bigfoot believer: Bigfoot lives in another dimension, and returns there after his forays into our world.

My point is that God proponents have gone further in their evasiveness to disproof than the Santa and unicorn proponents. Daniel Dennett points out that folk gods did not start out with immunity to scientific investigation, they all interacted regularly with the natural world in ways which should be easily detectable. As our scientific understanding and tools have advanced, God has evolved to be ever more distant, and ever more nontestable. Of course, at the same time He becomes ever more irrelevant.

Take this "necessary being" idea. That is a made-up concept to sidestep God around an attempted disproof. There is no reason to believe that God actually exists necessarily.

Theological arguments are often appeals to intuition. What is intuitively correct about how the world works is invariably factually false and what is factually true is invariably non-intuitive or counter-intuitive. For example, it is intuitively correct that solids are mostly matter when in fact solids are mostly space. Intuition fails to find the factually true answers so consistently that we are justified in a priori discounting answers based solely on intuition. Theists have a tendency to do the opposite, they place appeals to intuition on par with (or even over) empirical evidence as a method for justifying beliefs about how the world works.

A person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit's witness, but it does not serve as the fundamental way in which he knows Christianity to be true. If the arguments of natural theology and Christian evidences are successful, as I claim they are, then Christian belief is also warranted by such arguments and evidences for the person who grasps them, even if that person would still be warranted in their absence. Such a person is doubly warranted in his Christian belief, in the sense that he enjoys two sources of warrant. So evidential arguments on behalf of Christianity are, in my view, sufficient for knowledge of Christianity's truth but they are not necessary for knowledge of Christianity's truth. Now the question both of you pose concerns the role of defeaters of Christian belief. Properly basic beliefs can be defeasible; that is to say, they can be defeated by other incompatible beliefs which one might come to accept. In such a case, the individual in question must either come up with a defeater for the defeater or else give up some of his beliefs if he is to remain rational. Thus, for example, a Christian who encounters the problem of evil is faced with a potential defeater of his belief in God. Christian apologetics can help to formulate answers, such as the Free Will Defense in response to the problem of evil, in order to defeat the putative defeaters. But Plantinga also argues that in some cases, the original belief itself may so exceed its alleged defeater in warrant that it becomes an intrinsic defeater of its putative defeater. He gives the example of someone accused of a crime and against whom all the evidence stands, even though that person knows he is innocent. In such a case, that person is not rationally obligated to abandon belief in his own innocence and to accept instead the evidence that he is guilty. The belief that he did not commit the crime intrinsically defeats the defeaters brought against it by the evidence. Plantinga makes the theological application by suggesting that belief in God may similarly intrinsically defeat all the defeaters that might be brought against it.Plantinga does not to my knowledge clearly commit himself to the view that the witness of the Holy Spirit is an intrinsic defeater-defeater. Such a thesis is independent of the model as presented. But I have argued that the witness of the Spirit is, indeed, an intrinsic defeater of any defeaters brought against it. For it seems to me inconceivable that God would allow any believer to be in a position where he would be rationally obliged to commit apostasy and renounce Christ. It seems to me rather that in such a situation a loving God would intensify the Spirit's witness in such a way that it becomes an intrinsic defeater of the defeaters such a person faces. Now it might be said, that God would, indeed, not permit a person to fall into circumstances where the rational thing for him to do is to apostatize and turn his back on God, but what God would do is provide sufficient evidence to such an individual so that he is able to defeat through argument and evidence the alleged defeater. I grant that such a view is possible (how could anyone who believes in middle knowledge think differently?). But as I look at the world in which we actually live, such a view strikes me as naïve. The vast majority of people in the world have neither the time, training, nor resources to develop a full-blown Christian apologetic as the basis of their faith or to defeat the sundry defeaters which they encounter. I have been deeply moved by the plight of Christians as I have traveled abroad and seen the sometimes desperate circumstances in which they find themselves. In Europe, for example, the university

culture is overwhelmingly secular and even atheistic. I met many theological students when we lived in Germany whose professors had exposed them to nothing but radical biblical criticism and anti-Christian scholarship. These students held on to Christian faith in spite of the evidence. It was far, far worse in Eastern Europe and Russia. I wish I could convey to you the spiritual darkness and oppression that existed behind the Iron Curtain during the days of the Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian believer, "Have you no resources to help you in your Christian life?" He replied, "Well, there is an encyclopedia of atheism published by the state, and by reading what is attacked there, you can learn something. But that's about all." These bothers and sisters endured horrible oppression and atheistic indoctrination by the Marxist regime and yet did not abandon Christ. As I emphasized in my answer to Question #13, evidence varies from generation to generation and from place to place and is accessible only to those privileged few who have the education, leisure time, and resources to explore it. God has provided a more secure basis for our faith than the shifting sands of evidence and argument, namely, the indwelling Holy Spirit.Moreover, this conclusion seems in line with New Testament teaching on the witness of the Holy Spirit. While non-believers reject New Testament teaching, Christians should take it seriously. Ponder, then, John's words:And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. . . . If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has borne witness to his Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. He who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne to his Son (1 John 5:6-10).As Christian believers we have the testimony of God living within us, the Holy Spirit, whose testimony exceeds in force all human testimony.So in answer to your question, Kyle, I think that in fact God will not allow someone to be in a position in which the rational thing for him to do is to reject God and Christ and separate himself from God. Given that God is essentially all-loving, I'm inclined to say that such a thing will not only never happen, but that it is, indeed, impossible. It follows that Christians who have apostatized have done so in defiance of the Holy Spirit's work by quenching or grieving the Spirit, so that what they did was in the end irrational.Does that imply, Adam, as your sceptic says, that I think "evidence is unimportant when compared with faith?" No, because he's drawing a false contrast, comparing apples with oranges. Faith is not the issue here, but the ground for faith. Must the ground for faith be evidence? That is the question. We've already seen that evidentialism is bankrupt. Many of the things we know are not based on evidence. So why must belief in God be so based? Belief in God and the great truths of the Gospel is not a blind exercise of faith, a groundless leap in the dark. Rather, as Plantinga emphasizes, Christian belief is part of the deliverances of reason, grounded in the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, which is an objective reality mediated to me from God. What is true is that evidence, as it is defined in these discussions, plays a secondary role compared to the role God Himself plays in warranting Christian belief. Should we, then, ignore strong evidence if it shows that our faith is probably false? Of course not! My work as a philosopher exemplifies the effort to confront objections to Christian belief squarely and to answer them. But most Christians in the world don't have that luxury. For them they may have to hold to their Christian belief even though they lack an answer to the alleged defeater. What I insist on is that, given the witness of the Holy Spirit within them, they are entirely rational in so doing.

Yes, Matt, thank you for the Santa principle—it’s an excellent tool for disproving physical entities, or at least showing that they are unlikely.

I’m sorry if I have misunderstood what you said about Craig. My understanding of what Craig was saying in the video is that if some current evidence contradicts the testimony of the Holy Spirit then given enough time, thought and further evidence then he believes that the evidence would eventually agree with what the spirit says. I know that he said at a recent debate that there could be evidence that would make him question his faith such as a proof that Christ wasn’t really resurrected. It is true that he wrote, In Reasonable Faith that, “Philosophy is rightly the handmaid of theology.” However, later on he writes, “We know Christianity is true primarily by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Spirit. We show Christianity is true by presenting good arguments for its central tenets.” How does Craig’s belief in the Holy Spirit cause his arguments to be false? Aren’t you committing the genetic fallacy when you say that we need to put an asterisk by Craig’s arguments because he believes in the testimony of the Holy Spirit? The origin of his belief doesn’t affect the force of his arguments.

"Aren’t you committing the genetic fallacy when you say that we need to put an asterisk by Craig’s arguments because he believes in the testimony of the Holy Spirit? The origin of his belief doesn’t affect the force of his arguments."

Of course it does. The fact that he is willfully abandoning objectivity doesn't mean that his conclusion is necessarily wrong, but it justifies a HUGE asterisk next to his arguments.

Try turning it around. I and a small band of cult followers claim to have been privvy to the "internal witness" of the sacred worm orobouros. This worm tells us that we are living inside a simulation of a weapon system. The purpose of the simulation is to test various initial properties (laws of the universe) within certain constraints, to see which configuration leads to maximum entropy the quickest. Any apparent sign of negentropy (life, sentience, etc.) turns out to just be even more efficient ways of generating entropy -- life accelerates death. To the extent that we recognize death, destruction, and ultimate nothingness as the purpose of existence, we will be serving the goals of the simulation. As we understand more about physics, the evidence tends to support the conclusion that the laws of the universe are optimized to generate entropy. Any life-affirming religions that appear are clearly contrary to physics and work against the purposes of the simulation.

Now, suppose that you offer me evidence against this position. I then retort, "I refuse to be persuaded. The worm orobouros would not lead me wrong. I am confident that the evidence will eventually prove me right. You cannot understand, because the worm has not spoken to you".

What is your disproof of Santa, that you've searched the entire surface of the Earth and he can't be found? OK then, he lives under the ocean at the North Pole. Visiting all the chimneys in the world would require him to move too fast? Well then, he uses a wormhole so he actually doesn't have to travel far at all. Imagine that for every argument you made against Santa, I was willing to come up with a counter, no matter how preposterous. I could point out one argument which has actually been put forward by a Bigfoot believer: Bigfoot lives in another dimension, and returns there after his forays into our world.

Reginald Selkirk, my main disproof of Santa is that I know that the presents under the tree at Christmas are put there by parents and not Santa. If Santa could live in the Ocean, and he wasn’t detected by the USS Nautilus back in 1958, then we could use sonar to detect his vessel, or do a visual search using subs. Our current knowledge of wormholes indicates that an entity the size of Santa would not fit in a wormhole, so your wormhole explanation is implausible.

In regards to your Bigfoot example, how would a hairy ape-like creature travel to another dimension? Besides time traveling in the fourth dimension, which seems incredibly implausible for a creature like Bigfoot as the challenges are immense, the fifth through the 11th dimensions are merely theoretical. The problem with all of the defenses of these material beings is that they are bound by physical laws. As material entities they are just as subject to entropy and the other laws of physics as you and I.

Your claim that the idea of a necessary being is made-up is surprising since you and I are living in a universe in motion. What causes and sustains the universe/multiverse if there is no uncaused cause or unmoved mover? The fact that we are living in a universe/multiverse (assuming a multiverse exists) that is contingent on something else is proof that a necessary being exists. Without God the universe/multiverse and everything in it would cease to exist.

Now, suppose that you offer me evidence against this position. I then retort, "I refuse to be persuaded. The worm orobouros would not lead me wrong. I am confident that the evidence will eventually prove me right. You cannot understand, because the worm has not spoken to you".Do you suppose that an asterisk would be justified?

JS Allen, I suppose our natural tendency is to be wary of outlandish claims such as this, but it is not rational to simply dismiss someone’s arguments out-of-hand because of their background or beliefs. It doesn’t matter if someone is an atheist, agnostic, Christian, goat worshiper or Orobourosist, we still must evaluate their arguments as objectively as possible. If the Orobourosist said trust me because the worm said so I wouldn’t trust them, but if the Orobourosist presented some good evidence and sound arguments then as a rational person I would listen and evaluate their arguments, and perhaps be persuaded by them.

Reginald Selkirk, my main disproof of Santa is that I know that the presents under the tree at Christmas are put there by parents and not Santa...

Remember, the goal of this exercise is to never give up, no matter how preposterous the position gets. So here are some counters:1) The presents are really from Santa, but he let your parents pretend to have supplied them in order to enhance their image in your eyes.2) YOUR parents bought YOUR presents, but that doesn't necessarily apply to all the other children.

If Santa could live in the Ocean, and he wasn’t detected by the USS Nautilus back in 1958, then we could use sonar to detect his vessel, or do a visual search using subs.

I didn't say anything about a vessel, he lives in a cave under the sea floor. The entrance is very well camouflaged. If any subs tried searching, they would certainly suffer electronic failures. Santa's transit sub wasn't present at the time, or it doesn't show up well on sonar due its being reindeer-powered, or he uses stealth technology. Or Santa, as is well-known, has excellent intelligence gathering systems, and would know when search subs were around, during which time he would temporariliy move to his alternate undisclosed location.

And so on. To repeat, there need not be any evidence that such a state is actually true, the goal is simply to dodge the counter-arguments by whatever means necessary.

In regards to your Bigfoot example, how would a hairy ape-like creature travel to another dimension?

As I thought I pointed out, the 'Bigfoot is from another dimension' is not my own, that is an actual argument supplied by a Bigfoot proponent (which I am not).

linkLapseritis said conventional Bigfoot investigators have not found the creature because they are limited in their belief that Bigfoot is "simply a relic hominid that never became extinct." "That really may be true," Lapseritis said in a telephone interview. "But in addition to that, (Bigfoot) may literally be, as I've discovered, a paraphysical, interdimensional native people that have told me and other people telepathically that they were brought here millions of years ago by their friends, the star people."

Strange indeed, but is it stranger than the claims put forward to defend God from disproof? In the case of God, we have such bizarre claims as that God is both a temporal and atemporal being (Craig).

Matt also makes an excellent point when he observes that atheists can also fall victim to cognitive biases. I would be the first to admit that I am biased against acceptance of the miracles described in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, etc. It is precisely because of this bias that I spend far more time studying apologetic arguments than arguments knocking them down.

This is an excellent post Matt, spot on. Many atheists are baffled by William Lane Craig (ie. how can he not see the weaknesses in his arguments?) but I think what you have described here is THE key to getting inside his head.

For those who would enjoy watching Craig exposed for the snake oil salesman that he is, please check out his forthcoming debate with English philosopher Stephen Law on October 17,2011. The event is being hosted by Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable! program and the question being debated is the existence of God. Tickets for the event (to be held at Westminster Hall in London) are available through Premier Christian Radio's website.

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"Can you honestly say that you are truly open to the possibility that God exists?"I've changed my mind on things before, and I can do it again. The problem I've found is that there's a really low standard for what constitutes a case for God, and by rejecting that I'm accused of being close-minded.

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Atheism

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.